How might ranked-choice voting and identical candidate names completely upend the accuracy of multimillion-dollar election forecasts?

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A multimillion-dollar forecast can be badly distorted if it treats a race like a normal two-candidate contest when the ballot design and counting rules make voter behavior far less predictable. Alaska is the clearest example. Prediction markets have heavily favored Mary Peltola over Sen. Dan Sullivan, but the race includes another candidate, Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., whose near-identical name raises the risk of ballot confusion. In a standard plurality election, even a small number of mistaken votes could act as a spoiler and flip a close race. That is why the issue triggered lawsuits, investigations and a DOJ effort to delay certification. But Alaska does not use plurality voting. It uses ranked-choice voting, which changes the math. Voters can rank both Sullivans, meaning a mistaken or strategic first choice may still transfer to the intended candidate in later rounds. That reduces the classic spoiler effect and makes it much harder to infer the final outcome from headline polling or simple win probabilities. A market price that does not properly model vote transfers, ballot exhaustion, and how confused voters rank backup choices can overstate confidence. The added problem is that this uncertainty is hard to quantify in real time. Courts noted there is no practical way to determine after the fact whether a vote for Daniel J. Sullivan was intentional without violating ballot secrecy. That means traders may be pricing rumor, legal noise, and incomplete assumptions rather than …

Prediction Markets Lift Democrats' Senate Odds to 77.3% as Gap With Pollsters Narrows to 2.9 Points

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Prediction Markets Lift Democrats' Senate Odds to 77.3% as Gap With Pollsters Narrows to 2.9 Points

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